Yesterday was an experiment and it will become permanent. I spent a day away from the Internet. No Facebook, no Twitter, no reading the news. It was wonderful. I’m thinking that I’ll give up the internet for Lent. Really, boys and girls, if you don’t do it, already, then make it part of your life: unplug from time to time. The ‘net has become like the TV in 1984.
Anyways…
John Kerry says that Iran isn’t allowed to use the bucket of money we’re giving them for terrorist operations. I’m sure you’ll all sleep soundly tonight.
Trump really messed up on his comments about McCain. I’ve got lots of problems with McCain. I hope he draws a TEA Party challenger. I think he’s often a bit of a jerk in the demeaning way he deals with GOP base. But, no matter how you slice it, McCain is a war hero. The recent poll showing Trump leading the primary field nationwide had a little tid-bit in it for the detail-minded: the day after Trump’s insulting comment broke, his support dropped like a rock. He won’t win a single primary and he’ll never be President.
Monk Rock? Well, we Catholics are rather dangerous, transgressive outsiders these days…
Saudi’s threaten military action against Iran. So, Obama has fundamentally transformed us – it is not backwards, corrupt monarchies taking a stand for decency in the world instead of the United States.
The Democrat party has decided that writing off the elderly vote is best – Obama Administration proposes to deny self-defense rights to people on Social Security if third party’s handle their bills.
Walker up by 9 in Iowa. Walker wins Iowa, NH and SC, he’s the GOP nominee.
Blogs For Victory 
John Kerry says that Iran isn’t allowed to use the bucket of money we’re giving them for terrorist operations.
That contradicts what Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the U.S. said. (BTW, I tried to find the most left-wing source I could, lest I be accused by one of our trolls of cherry picking)
There are no controls on anything, really – even in the nuke stuff, its weeks before anyone can get in to inspect…and I understand that Iran’s military facilities are off limits.
Essentially, we just got Iran off the hook – boxed into a corner, we’ve now opened a door for them.
Trump Opens McCains Treasonous Can of Worms
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/07/20/trump-opens-mccains-treasonous-can-of-worms/
Not a military hero. And too soon forgotten how after his wife waited for him to come home and raised the kids alone, when she was confined to a hospital bed he was cheating on her with a wealthy woman who financed his political campaign. A hero thinks of others, this man was only thinking of himself.
I am not a McCain fan, but I do consider him a MILITARY hero. History is full of people who were, or are, pretty despicable people in many ways but who at the same time showed great courage and character in others. I think McCain might be one of those. But he might not be.
The facts of his military service are stark and undeniable. He did serve his country with distinction, at great risk to himself. He did narrowly escape being burned to death in an aircraft carrier accident that was no fault of his—the film of his escape is harrowing. He was captured, he was tortured, and he did refuse to be released unless his men were released at the same time, meaning that he endured more months of agony because he had a duty to his men.
If we draw a line at the end of his military career, I think that anything prior to that line shows him to be a military hero who served his nation with courage and distinction.
Unfortunately, on this side of that line it is a different story—as far as we know. I am adamantly opposed to infidelity, I find it despicable, but at the same time every marriage has its own identity and its own secrets. We can look at the appearance of the first McCain marriage and draw conclusions that John was unfaithful to a wife who still loved him, who remained faithful to him while he was imprisoned, who was an honorable woman who deserved his trust and fidelity and who was betrayed at a time she was suffering from a debilitating disease. We can speculate that it was because of this disease, that he just couldn’t be bothered with a sick wife. But he has never spoken of this period in the marriage, and more to the point I don’t think she has, either. On the surface, the fact that she was suffering from a debilitating disease makes her appear to be even more victimized, but to be completely fair it is also possible that the disease is irrelevant to the fact that their marriage was over, for whatever reason, and even that this was a mutual decision.
Having said that, I agree that the right thing to do would have been to end it before embarking on an affair. But there are things no one outside the marriage can know, and have no business knowing.
An example: I was very close to a man whose wife suffered from a very advanced case of Alzheimer’s. He loved her, and she loved him, and she told him, when she knew how bad it was going to get, that she wanted him to move on, find someone else, and be happy. This was a very personal thing between two people who loved each other. Their children knew of it, but it was a very intimate detail of family life. I am still very close to one of his sons, and after his death I was told about the pact between his parents, when his wife knew she was going to slip into a shadow world where she would not really be there for him any more.
When my friend became close to a woman he worked with, and then entered into a relationship with her, he was savaged by people who did not know the facts. His children understood and encouraged him to find happiness, knowing that their mother had wanted this. He remained married to his wife, he found her the best possible care, he spent time with her, but she didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It was a tragedy, and the family did the best they could to deal with it. My friend built a new life as if his wife was dead, and for all intents and purposes she was. In his late sixties, he divorced her, for complicated financial reasons, though he continued to pay for her care and visit her regularly, and married the woman he had been sharing his life with, but he never stopped grieving for his first wife. Some might say he should have spent his last years alone, out of respect for a woman whose mind did not know him. Others, myself included, say marriage is a covenant between two people and they can choose how to honor that covenant, and if they choose to honor it in their hearts the way my friend and his first wife did, no matter how it may look to those on the outside, it’s nobody’s business but their own.
When I think of my friend, and the vile and vicious things said about him by people who didn’t know anything but the most superficial aspects—his poor wife was in an institution and he was seeing another woman—I remember that it is easy to assume knowledge of a relationship when in fact there is none.
We all know that many things happen when a man is away at war, whether or not he is imprisoned. For all we know, John McCain was suffering for his country while his wife was unfaithful to him, engaging in an affair or two while he was being tortured, kept going by the idea of getting home to her. For all we know, he was crushed and devastated when he learned of this. For all we know, he stayed in the marriage BECAUSE of her illness, so she would have the benefit of being a military wife entitled to health care. FOR ALL WE KNOW . We don’t know. He never spoke of the reasons for the end of the marriage, not his nor hers, and neither did she.
I don’t admire John McCain for a lot of reasons, but I never criticize his military service or his courage or dedication to his men. And while his affair may seem sordid on the surface, which is all any of us can see, I also know that the surface can give a false impression of reality. I also recoil when someone refers to his second wife’s money, implying that McCain betrayed an innocent and loving and dependent and trusting wife because he found a rich woman to run around with and then latch onto.
BTW, I read your link and it reeks of innuendo and smear tactics. For example, it says:
“Here are the facts as we know them:
According to Colonel Ted Guy, John McCain’s commander as a POW, McCain collaborated with the enemy.
McCain is accused of giving information that led to the downing of 60 US aircraft
McCain is accused of training North Vietnamese air defense personnel
McCain is accused of making over 30 propaganda broadcasts against the US, broadcasts he moved to have classified when he was elected to the senate. “
Take a closer look at that statement.
Here are the facts as we know them: Since when are unsubstantiated accusations reframed as “facts”?
According to Colonel Ted Guy, John McCain’s commander as a POW, McCain collaborated with the enemy.
McCain has admitted to admitting to various lies, as has nearly every single captured American in the hands of the Viet Cong. “Collaborated” is a very sinister spin on something that was not only common, but expected.
McCain is accused of giving information that led to the downing of 60 US aircraft
McCain is accused of training North Vietnamese air defense personnel
McCain is accused of making over 30 propaganda broadcasts against the US, broadcasts he moved to have classified when he was elected to the senate
Wow. That is a lot of innuendo, and absolutely none of it is backed up by a single piece of evidence. Oh, the article says there IS evidence, it has just been hidden by McCain. How convenient.
After years of analyzing propaganda, its stink is readily identifiable, and this reeks of rage and hostility, with little or nothing to back it up.
Again, I don’t like John McCain. I don’t like his personality, I don’t like his politics, I don’t like his Progressive tendencies, I don’t respect him, I don’t think he is a good Senator and I don’t think he would have been a very good president (though a brilliant president when compared to what we got). I just think he should be judged on what is actually KNOWN and not on a bunch of shrill hyperbole.
Took a bit of looking, but Colonel Guy was, indeed, a POW – but I don’t see any indication that he was imprisoned in the same place as Senator McCain. I haven’t been able to locate a document where Colonel Guy accuses McCain of turning traitor – but I did find a document where he describes his own capture and the horrific beating he took right after being captured…and he admits in that document that had any of his Vietnamese captors spoke English, he probably would have spilled quite a lot of information just to stop the beating. I get the distinct impression that some out there in the Conspiracy Theory World are using Colonel Guy as a means to lend credibility to their own views…and given that Colonel Guy has been dead for 16 years, there’s no way for anyone today to check on his views. Given that Colonel Guy was an advocate for the theory that US prisoners were held post-1973, it could be that he ran afoul of McCain and others over this issue and maybe there was some bad blood.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that McCain did provide information to the enemy – unless a person has been beaten quite as badly as McCain and the rest of the American POWs were beaten, no person has the right to judge. Some say that torture doesn’t work – the reality is that torture works very well…you can break almost everybody (and I suspect strongly that most of those whom it didn’t break in Vietnam ended up dead; and if anyone doesn’t believe me that torture can break nearly everyone, I suggest they just read volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago).
But let’s look at the meat of it – what possible information could McCain provide which would result in the downing of 60 American aircraft? Within a day of two of being captured, any tactical information on American plans that McCain had would be useless.
Trained Vietnamese? In what? How to use Russian SAMs?
How could McCain move to have Vietnamese broadcasts classified?
McCain and the rest of the POWs were put under duress never seen before by American military personnel. Yes, a lot of them broke under the strain – and I won’t for a minute condemn them for it. And here’s the kicker on it all: McCain was offered release and refused it unless all the POWs got to go home.
How on Earth has McCain come up as a topic? Wasn’t that the election before last election?
I love what Trump is doing in general, kicking the hornet’s nest of political correctness, but I trying to Swiftboat McCain is both unwise and unpatriotic.
Now, let’s move on to topics that matter, right?
Can we please stop kowtowing to the Left’s program of Semantic Infiltration? That is, misusing terms because the Left has redefined them so often that they are accepted and used even by others?
“Swiftboating” was a reference to bringing out FACTS which debunked the self-serving lies told by John Kerry. It refers to his Swift Boat crew, who denied his stories by telling the truth.
It refers ONLY to the countering of self-serving lies with facts that prove those lies to be, well, lies. There is no way it could be used to mean attacks on John McCain, unless those attacks are by named individuals and backed up with some kind of objective evidence, to debunk claims made by McCain about himself and the nature of his service.
The McCain thing started with Trump going after him and Shawny piling on. I merely tried to inject a note of objectivity into the melee, pointing out the blatant hateful bias of the linked article and the fact that there is almost always more to a story than first meets the eye.
I know it is not relevant to anything, but every now and then my sense of fair play kicks in even when it is off-topic.
For a brief while I agreed that Trump was doing a service by, as you said, “kicking the hornet’s nest of political correctness”. But he is such a buffoon that he is now serving no real purpose at all, except as fodder for those who hate the Right to point to him and say “see how crazy those right-wingers are!”
Amazona
I will never kowtow to the left, especially when it comes to semantics.
But to thine self be true, Swiftboating was a brilliantly ruthless political strategy by Karl Rove – attack and deflate an opponent’s greatest strength. It was great and it knocked Kerry’s campaign on its ass where it belonged.
But I am not going to lie to myself and believe the stories floated about Kerry’s service. Kerry was an unpatriotic scumbag when he came back from Vietnam but he volunteered for a war Rove, et al, avoided and I’ll give props to any American that does that. I’ll glory in Kerry’s political destruction but I ain’t actually drinking the Swifties Kool-Aid and believing their stories.
Four months in country and he gets three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star and never misses a day of duty? And his Silver Star is approved based upon his own write-up of his own actions?
I don’t know. Kerry did volunteer and that stands in his credit – but the kinds of wounds Kerry got back in my Dad’s day on Saipan wouldn’t have got a Marine sent back to the battalion aid station, let alone get a Purple Heart. My Grandfather in World War One fought against severe odds in a tight battle and didn’t even get an individual commendation for it…methinks, perhaps, a Blue Blood was getting his ticket punched by other Blue Bloods. There was a lot of that going on in Vietnam – officers with good connections getting official combat duty for their service records; in fact, it was one of the problems we had, especially in the second half of the war.
But even if Kerry went into Vietnam as a true American patriot, he came out of it and spat on everything the United States stands for…and he did it for the merest political reasons…and for him in 2004 to try and pretend he was Blood and Guts Kerry, the Patriotic War Hero was disgusting.
How are we STILL talking about Kerry and McCain and anything else that stops us from talking about how to beat the Democrats?
Because Trump’s alligator mouth.
Well, I not only read the book written by one of the Swift Boat crew, a friend’s cousin was on the boat with Kerry and backed up what they said. He was one of those named in the book. Kerry volunteered for service because he was going to be drafted. He volunteered for Swift Boat duty at the time the boats ran safe courier service between the shore and off-shore Navy vessels, and by the time he got a boat they had been reassigned to riverine duty, at which time he pitched a wall-kicking fit and demanded a different, safer, assignment.
The book was very detailed, full of corroborating confirmation of many things that painted Kerry as a total tool. On one detail the boat was to lurk around a bend and intercept Vietnamese boats suspected of supplying the Viet Cong, and Kerry was supposed to be watching the radar to provide advance notice of approaching boats. He didn’t, and a boat came around the curve and the crew was completely surprised to see it. Because of the sudden appearance of the boat and the surprise on both sides, the man piloting the Vietnamese boat reached for his gun and an American on the Swift Boat shot at him, killing the child sitting on his lap. The entire crew expected to be court-martialed for this, or at the very least severely disciplined, and it turned out that Kerry simply wrote a false report on the incident.
Kerry’s crew hated him, thought he was a liar and a fool, and according to them they only came forward after seeing him bragging about his “service” and medals on TV and wanted to set the story straight. There was never a hint of Rove being involved, and whether or not Rove served is immaterial. You might as well claim that Gore was better than Rove because he “volunteered to serve” though he admitted he only did it because his father, running for reelection, made him, and he had babysitters during his whole tour as a “photographer” whose sole duty was to keep him safe while he smoked pot.
No,, “Swiftboating” is NOT a sneaky attack by an opponent, meant to discredit. It is a correction of a false record by statement of fact by witnesses.
How are we STILL talking about Kerry and McCain and anything else that stops us from talking about how to beat the Democrats?
Well, it will be hard to beat ANYONE if we are duped by lies and duped into using the terminology invented by the Left until it takes on the appearance of fact (“abortion RIGHTS”, “Swiftboating” as an unfair attack, etc.) and dependent on Identity Politics.
I’m all for moving forward, but I think the only way to do this is to completely separate ourselves from Leftist propaganda that may have tainted our perceptions. And I think examination of things that may have been taken at face value, as fact, is an important skill to develop. When we can see through the Leftist spin on things, such as the redefinition of Swiftboating and the insertion of semantic infiltration till we have conservatives using terms like “abortion RIGHTS”, we are better equipped to see those tricks and scams when they are applied to other things.
I cringe when I see conservatives using the term “McCarthyism” as a pejorative. The man, while personally abrasive, stood up for what he thought was right, and rightfully identified, often BY NAME, Communists in the highest levels of our government, during a time when Communists were our Al Queda. He was later proved right. But the whole idea of McCarthy “witchhunting”
has been allowed to burrow into the consciousness of nearly all Americans, until it is simply accepted that he was a bad man doing bad things. Most people blame him for the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, without ever stopping to consider that he was a SENATOR.
We can’t beat them if we can’t identify them and their tricks, and stop being hand puppets, parroting their propaganda and undermining our own side.
What I think would be a good thing, once we get enough Senators with backbone, is to vote to reverse McCarthy’s censure. A recent history of the time revealed an astonishing bit of information: the newspaper which allegedly reported McCarthy having a different number of Communists than reported previously is missing that particular edition from its files. And there’s more like that – all through the records of the McCarthy era various crucial documents are missing…specifically, things which may have supported McCarthy’s case. Someone spent a lot of time sanitizing the record back in the day.
A few things to know:
It was Democrats who insisted that McCarthy name names. McCarthy didn’t want to because he was aware that not everyone on the list of suspects was an actual communist agent and he didn’t want innocent people dragged through the mud.
There were, indeed, two different lists – produced not by McCarthy, but by two different agencies of government. A lot of the names over-lapped, but not all of them. There were a different number of people on the lists.
A number of people who were cleared of being communist agents were only cleared because Truman’s Justice Department no-billed them at the Grand Jury…essentially setting up Grand Jury actions which were designed to not bring an indictment.
And the central fact of it was partisan politics: Democrats had been in charge when there was massive penetration of the United States government up to the highest levels by Soviet spies…they were determined that this issue not become an electoral problem for them and so they did everything they could to cover up what happened…and their most effective means of doing this was not to deal with what happened, but attack the messenger, Joe McCarthy.
McCain…Kerry…McCarthy. Wake me when we get to talking about Van Buren.
THIS is what the Left does, they get distraction discussions going about everything but their own shortcomings.
Amazona, if you have better info regarding Kerry in Vietnam I have to bow to knowledge. Both of you, if you want to honor McCarthy, go to town.
Now let’s talk about current stuff.
How about a game? We all know that, love him or hate him, Trump will not make it to the nomination but the question is, who will drop out before him? In fact, everyone, name the first five Republicans to drop out of the race, in the order you think they’ll drop.
We should throw a buck each into some online account and play a dead-pool through the election.
You seem to think that “topics that matter” revolve around personalities/scandals than ideas/ideology.
I suggest that the first thing to talk about in any political discussion is to stake out a position—do you believe that the country is best governed by a federal government severely restricted as to size, scope and power with most authority left to the states, or do you think the federal government should be expandable and have most of the authority, with state powers being secondary?
Without this kind of background, I think the rest is more like American Idol than political discourse.
Once this is established—-if you choose the first you are conservative even if you are a pro-abortion lesbian Wiccan, and if you choose the second you are a Liberal even if you are an NRA member and love Sean Hannity—-then you have to weed out the topics that do not fall within the scope of the presidency, or of Congress if you are talking about Congressional seats. That should eliminate a lot of the gotchas that media “journalists” obsess over, such as “do you think people are born gay?”
Then we can have some good discussions. One thing I find interesting is the question of whether border control is a federal or a state issue. Given the fact that national defense is an enumerated duty of the federal government, and unrestrained or poorly controlled immigration poses dangers to the nation, it would appear that this is a federal issue, but clearly states should be able to address it if the feds do not, and have a say in how it is handled in their states. However, they should not be allowed to override federal laws.
As for who will leave the race first, I agree that Trump will be one of the first. Carson, as well. He is a brilliant and honorable man, a true patriot with great ideas, but he is just not qualified to be president. The job calls for more than that. Kasich should be an early dropout—he has done well in Ohio but I don’t see him as president. Huckabee will also fall out quickly.
I’ve read some really critical comments about Walker and his former positions, but I think he has the chops to be a good president, and I don’t hesitate to support him. I think Cruz is the best of the lot, but like Rubio (and Jindal) he will be targeted (with good reason) for representing the hypocrisy of the Right after the arguments made against Obama for not being a Natural (as opposed to Native) Born Citizen, and we don’t need a candidate with additional and avoidable baggage.
Amazona
Quite the opposite of your assertion I “think that ‘topics that matter’ revolve around personalities/scandals,” I have been ranting that we are ONLY discussing personalities and scandals. And not just personalities and scandals, but OLD NEWS personalities and scandals.
If there is a scandal that is current, sure I like to talk about it. If there is a topic, I’m good with that talk. And, yes, I agree with you that the most important talks regard ideology.
What I don’t want to talk about is tired topics like McCain, Kerry and McCarthy. Anyone got an opinion on Bob Dole, for chrissake? He’d the only only recent one-time Presidential candidate not mentioned so far…
Bob, you’ve made your point and made your point and made your point, over and over. It’s a point I have made myself—back in 2008 the Left was still squealing about BOOOOSH!!!!! and I agreed that I would not vote for him. And you know what? I didn’t.
But you bypassed MY point, which is that just talking about people, as people, is silly, even if those people are currently running for office. Who they married, how they wear their hair, if they believe that homosexuality is inborn, all of it falls into Identity Politics, the bane of America and a main reason for its death spiral.
Back in my Liberal days, I was very excited about the entry of Gary Hart into the presidential race. I liked his ideas, such as cutting the military budget by slashing waste and overruns without affecting the military itself. (Not saying it was realistic, just saying it sounded good,) Anyway, when he got caught fooling around with Donna Rice, after taunting the press to follow him, I turned my back on Hart. Not because he was unfaithful to his wife, but because I did not want such a reckless man in the White House. I saw his challenge to the press as evidence of an immature person who liked taking risks. Even before I got interested in politics, I instinctively separated the personality from the politics. And my studies of history convinced me that certain behaviors are not acceptable in our leaders, not because I have a moral objection to them (which I often do) but because it so often pairs with that kind of recklessness and bad judgment, and because it can make that person very susceptible to blackmail if the bad guys find out about it and he doesn’t want his antics made public. Libertines and homosexuals were weak links in the chain because they had secrets, secrets they might go to any lengths to hide.
And, BTW, when I see something that is factually inaccurate, particularly if it also represents another success of Semantic Infiltration, I will do my best to point it out and correct it. So get over it, and see if you can actually discuss politics or if you just want to talk about PEOPLE, albeit people in the running now.
And McCarthy IS relevant now, because the attacks on him and his agenda have (thanks to the incessant and unfortunately successful efforts of the Left in demeaning him, and by extension ridiculing his attacks on the Left and his efforts to warn America about the dangers of Leftist infiltration into government) made people hesitant to be tarred with the same brush. This success has led to a certain squeamishness about pointing out the same dangers today.
Let someone point out the presence of Marxists in Obama’s personal circle of advisors and appointees and what is the response? It is a sneering jibe that this is “just more McCarthyism”.
A true understanding of what McCarthy did, and why, as well as how and why the Left demonized him, is very important.
Looking back over the history, I think that Douglas MacArthur was the first victim of the Progressive Smear…in the run-up to the 1944 campaign, the hero of the day was not yet Dwight Eisenhower, but Douglas MacArthur…who was winning astonishing victories at relative low cost in blood even though he was at the tail-end of the allied supply line (pretty much everyone had priority over the Southwest Pacific Theater). News paper reports, which had been nice to him in ’41 and ’42 (when American needed a hero during our WWII nadir), turned south in ’43 and in a very odd circumstance, the only letters from the troops about MacArthur were negative…even though, unlike most senior commanders, he was always making sure the troops had all they needed, was routinely seen in the front line areas and was winning battles with strategy rather than blood. I suspect that the Progressives were making sure that he didn’t emerge as a credible threat to FDR in the ’44 campaign.
The McCain comments were in response to the statements made in this article so I didn’t think it was off topic, just disagreement. I posted one article but there are many, many I won’t waste time with of interviews and written statements and testimony from those who served with and some who also were in a position to know more than most of us because they were P.O.W.’s with McCain. Yes, the marriage may have been a lot of things we don’t know about. But the classifying of information that might have brought other captured Americans home which McCain is documented as having authored legislation to do is not speculation. I simply respectfully disagree.
Unless you have proof that there were not serious and legitimate reasons to classify this information, the motives for doing so are not only speculation but easily spun to imply an effort to hide something nefarious.
Well, this should please Bob. The bad news just keeps coming for Hillary.
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Now THAT’S what I’m talkin’ bout!
Your welcome, Bob. We aim to please.
We have to still go with Hillary as the overall front runner because she’ll have endless money to campaign with and the MSM will cover for her and smear the GOP…but she is about the worst possible candidate, on the merits, to ever come down the pike…and that includes Obama. Obama was a zero-accomplishment nobody…but at least he was young and vibrant and hadn’t been hanging on to power and wealth for decades like a leech.
We’ll see how it comes out – but as long as we pick a good nominee (Walker, Jindal, eg), I think we can win this.
Now comes Hillary to NC for a fund raiser. No Scooby van but a nice entourage. To where may you ask. “I must ask, I must ask.” House of a wall street broker for a fund-raising dinner at $2,700 minimum. My opinion–that gets you a seat at the kids table.
Thought, for LIVs, that Hillary hated Wall Street and all that ilk. I could be mistaken but doubt it.
Hillary is the Establishment – and if we could just get LIVs to understand that, we’d win easy.